A look at The Vatican Prophecies: Investigating Supernatural Signs, Apparitions and
Miracles in the Modern Age written by John Thavis

The Vatican Prophecies: Investigating Supernatural Signs, Apparitions and
Miracles in the Modern Age is written by John Thavis. The title speaks for
itself and it is a good interesting read. A bit more logical depth would have
been a good thing. Some of the miracles give us lessons about caution.

The book tells us about Naples man Furgiero Onofri. This man told the truth
about the St Januarius revelry when the blood of the saint allegedly turns into
fresh running blood. It was far from holy or godly. He “shook his head
disdainfully. He wasn’t especially enthused about the day’s pageantry, he said,
because it was all show and very little faith.”

He went on to say that he saw the saint while suffering a heart attack “It
was Januarius, and I knew I was going to be saved.” Then he goes on to say that
he visits the statue of the saint to pray to him and adds, “Well, I suppose it’s
prayer”. And then he says, “We look at each other and communicate
telepathically, even if he’s only a statue.”

This psychic stuff and depending on visions to tell you that you are going to
be well and the paganism around the festivals of the saint point to the miracle
being false. It fails the fruits criteria as set down by Christ. Christ was
clear a true miracle is not marked by such nonsense.

Of Medjugorje’s Mirjana, we read that the Gospa who appears to her avoids
saying nonbelievers for that would be judging! So this politically correct
apparition just says,” [those] who don’t yet know the heart of God.” So Mary
cannot judge but surely she can if she is in Heaven and those in Heaven see all
things in God!

The Virgin replied when the crowd asked for a sign at Podbrdo in 1981 that
those are blessed who have not seen but believe. The problem is that the Church
says an apparition being really is only a matter of opinion and for God it is
about the message not the vision or miracles. Here Mary talks as if you should
just believe and not care if it is true! It was different for Jesus to tell
Thomas that those who have not seen his resurrected body but believe for that is
part of Christianity’s required belief. A vision in its early days in Yugoslavia
is not in the same league!

The book says that Mary telling St Bernadette at Lourdes that she was the
Immaculate Conception was strange. As that moment was central in the whole story
it makes the whole thing strange.

There is an interesting quote from expert in apparitions Father Mucci.

Here is the relevant line from the book: “Apparitions do not transpire in the
objective material world, but in the subjective mind of the visionary. At
Lourdes, the Madonna was not really in the grotto. She was in the mind of
Bernadette, who was touched by a special grace”.

That would refute the apparition of Knock where something was on the gable
wall and nobody had any special graces or holiness after. Nobody became a nun.

The Turin Shroud, purported burial cloth of Jesus carrying his image and
blood has to get discussed.

The book mentions Fanti of the University of Padua who claimed that fibre
analysis of the Turin Shroud using infrared and spectroscopic devices works out
at “33 BC, give or take 250 years”.

It tell us how Avignon pope, Clement VII, at the time of the Lirey Shroud
controversy decided to let the image be displayed as long as no claims that it
was the real cloth Jesus was buried in were made. This amounts to declaring it
just a holy picture not a relic.

Next shroudie is Jewish Barrie Schwortz. He regards it as Jesus’s cloth but
devoid of any evidence that Jesus resurrected or came back to life. He sees no
evidence of radiation and quotes Ray Rogers a STURP expert who found that some
kind of low temperature, not radiation, caused the image to form. To quote
Schwortz, “So it wasn’t a burst of radiation”.

A Maillard reaction is a highly favoured explanation for the image. Schwortz
things low levels of ammonia came from the corpse and chemically bonded with
saphonaria which was on the cloth to make a brownish image. Conveniently, when
Rogers had a chance to test this he had no body available!

Few seem to pay attention to how much the image looks like an x ray. My question
here is the reason the shroud man looks like an x ray particularly the fingers
is that rotting has set in?
Another quote, “Nazi officials posed unusual and insistent questions about the
Shroud and its custody. Hitler was believed to have been obsessed about certain
objects related to the life of Christ, including the Holy Grail and the Holy
Lance of Longinus, and now he appeared to have his eye on the burial cloth.”
Quite the man of faith wasn’t he?

The book reminds us that the Vatican has never found any cure attributed to the
shroud to be worth elevating to official recognised status. That is interesting.
The drama about the shroud is about trying to bludgeon sceptics with science and
is not about miracle healings of body or soul. The shroud is not a miracle by
Christ’s criteria about fruits.

Now exorcisms are going to be our topic.

A priest Maginot tested a possible possession victim by putting a cross on her
head. “Latoya began to convulse. He withdrew the cross, and she calmed down.
“You have a classic sign, aversion to holy objects. That means you’re
possessed.”

It is obvious how careless and irresponsible a diagnosis that is! And why did
the demon let him put it on her and not react before that? It is play acting. Or
she is.

It makes no sense for demons to fear blessed objects for they are just objects
and not fear prayer far worse. “Maginot prayed the exorcism rite over Latoya as
she sat in a chair, and she showed no reaction, even when he placed his crucifix
on her head.” Again we see proof that the demon is pretending to fear the cross.

It even tore up her rosary so how come it was able to go near blessed rosary
beads?

At a future exorcism, Maginot prayed over Latoya, “I adjure you, Satan, enemy of
human salvation, recognize the justice and goodness of God the Father, who has
condemned your pride and envy with just judgment: Depart from this handmaid of
God, Latoya.” This is worth quoting for it is full of judgmental assumptions.
Satan is not put on trial about assumed to be guilty. The references to God
judging are interesting considering popular Catholicism tries to pretend he does
not judge for he is too politically correct!

Maginot stated, “Latoya’s exorcisms were not up to Hollywood standards.” He went
on to say there were no rotating heads or floating around in mid-air. There was
no abnormal strength.
An exorcist called Bamonte says that it may take years for exorcism to get the
demon out. The book goes:

Anyone who doubts the existence of the devil should attend one of his sessions,
he said, and hear the demon speaking through the individual possessed. “You
sprinkle holy water on the person and you hear him cry out: ‘It burns! It
burns!’ One time a demon told me, ‘It’s like having muriatic acid poured on top
of you!’

Why would holy water burn a demon? Why can’t it just hate it? The burning
supports the notion that God burns the wicked in Hell. He even makes holy water
like acid! That is not a very good endorsement for the use of holy water! Or the
users! Are they trying to scald demons?

The book mentions exorcist Gabriel Amorth who “says he has performed more than
one hundred thousand exorcisms, a claim that some church experts find
implausible. He uses restraining ropes to hold down the possessed during the
ritual, which can become violent.” The use of ropes is criminal and advocating
it should be criminal too!

Of the Mother Teresa miracle, the cure of Monica Besra that got her beatified/canonised
the book has this to say,

As miracles go, though, this one was almost too perfect. In fact, the story had
already begun to fray at the edges. Besra’s husband, who refused to come to Rome
for the beatification, told Time magazine that the supposed miracle was “much
ado about nothing,” declaring: “My wife was cured by the doctors and not by any
miracle.” A similar note was struck by the leaders of the Science and
Rationalists’ Association of India and by a former state health minister, all of
whom claimed the healing was the result of medical treatment, not of prayers to
Mother Teresa. Some Indian doctors questioned the original diagnosis of a cyst;
it may simply have been abdominal swelling, they argued, that could have been
resolved by the antitubercular drugs. Two of the doctors who cared for Besra
testified that her recovery had come gradually, in response to their treatment.

A miracle story about Sister Matilde is interesting. She inhaled a two inch pin
that ended up in the lung. She asked a possible saint Father Agostino Roscelli
to cure her just before she was due for surgery. She was not ill but there was a
risk of illness. X rays were taken and it was found the pin was gone and oddly
enough was found in the colon. Additional scans revealed that it had traveled,
inexplicably, to her colon. It ended up coming out of her body that way. The
Vatican accepted this as an official miracle! It fails the classic tests for a
miracle as the healing was not instant and looks like a very strange natural
occurrence that is not fully understood. If is not a miracle, it shows that
bizarre things happen in medicine.

One line goes later, “It certainly wasn’t through his own merit, he says, so it
must have been the power of prayer.” It is Catholic doctrine that you don’t get
a miracle because you deserve it so it is the power of prayer. Most of us see
that as blaming us as sinners for not getting results and we do feel we deserve
miracles, we do.

The bilocation Saint Alphonsus de’ Liguori comes up in the book. The saint was
in Arienzo. He went into a trance and came out of days later to say he had been
visiting the pope. “His aides thought he had simply been dreaming, until a
messenger brought news of the pope’s death, which had occurred at the very
moment Alphonsus regained consciousness. Later, multiple witnesses claimed to
have seen the saint in Arienzo and in Rome during the same time frame.”

This is the kind of miracle that challenges the resurrection of Jesus account.
What if Jesus was alive and did the resurrection appearances through bilocation?

There is a good lesson on Catholic doctrine about visions,
The role of private messages or visions or prophecies…was not to complete or add
to scriptural teachings. Nor did they demand a response of faith—Catholics were
free to ignore them, even when approved…when the church “approved” a private
revelation, it was not endorsing any specific supernatural claim, but simply
decreeing that its message contained nothing contrary to faith and morals.

Errors in the visionary book, Life of the Blessed Virgin Mary by Mary Catherine
Emmerich are mentioned.
Emmerich was led by Mary so much that she “added details to Mary’s life that
struck some as excessive. She spent several hundred words describing her
coiffure at her wedding, extending even to the little plaits that were
interwoven with silk and pearls.” Is Mary that frivolous?
What about her racism: At times she put a strange spin on biblical passages, as
when she declared that, because of God’s curse, Noah’s son Ham became the
progenitor of “the black, idolatrous, stupid nations.”

At the end we think about religion and science.

Brother Guy Consolmagno of Mount Graham is cited, “People trying to reconcile
science with supernatural signs make some fundamental mistakes. First, they
think that both science and religion are big books of facts that you have to
believe, and these two books are supposed to agree. But science is not a big
book of facts. Science is a conversation about the data, and how to understand
them. Religion is even less a big book of facts. It’s the exploration of a
relationship with God.”

Science is based on facts and is a conversation about facts. Religion is more
than a relationship with God for you don’t need a long-winded Bible rambling
about history etc for that. Consider how Catholicism is far more complicated
than a system that was about merely loving God would be.

The brother is just trying to muddy science so that if it contradicts religion
you will not pay attention or see it.

The book could use more critical perspectives but overall I highly recommend it.